Shock of the Anthropocene: Winners and losers in new world era

Earth is entering a time when humans are a major geological force. A new book says we must all help manage this new world – and not let technocrats run the show

Who should own the forests and define what they are for?

Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

By Fred Pearce

LATER this year it will be official. Geologists at the International Commission on Stratigraphy are likely to rule that we have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene – an era in which humans are a major geological force, putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that will persist for millennia, eating the ozone layer, re-engineering the nitrogen cycle and more.

Precisely when the era began is still up for grabs. Some, including Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-winning atmospheric chemist who coined the term “Anthropocene”, say it started when coal-burning steam engines launched the industrial age. Others point to the dawn of agriculture. But the smart money is on 16 July 1945, when the first atom bomb was exploded in New Mexico.

The choice will be a human one as much as anything. That is the departure point of The Shock of the Anthropocene by French science historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: their book argues that the new era is as much a political as a stratigraphic event. How we see it, and how we manage the planet in its name, will be highly political. That is how it should be, they argue. Anyone who says differently clearly has their own hidden political agenda.

Of course, that includes the many scientists who like to keep politics out of everything. This book is in part an attack on them for, as the authors put it, wanting to use the new era to create “a grand narrative” giving them “a monopoly position in defining what is happening to us and in prescribing what needs to be done”. Naturally, historians don’t like this “geocratic” hegemony.

The authors don’t deny we are in the Anthropocene, or that scientists are right to measure and analyse it. Their central charge is that too many environmental scientists buy into the idea that living in the new era on Spaceship Earth requires a technocracy, rather than some politics in the cockpit. If we pretend that political choices do not exist, then the bad guys win, they say.

The authors are keen to dispel some myths about their position. One is that until recently we were unaware of the environmental damage we were doing but that now we have woken up to the dangers, we will act; capitalism may have created the crisis, but it can fix it. Rubbish, they say: “The story of awakening is a fable.”

They are right in that there is nothing new about concern for the environment. Every society remakes the peril in its own image – and its interests. Past examples often look nasty. Many early 20th-century environmentalists, such as UNESCO’s first chief, Julian Huxley, were keen on eugenics. They blamed the state of Earth on overbreeding inferiors in foreign countries. Thomas Malthus, environmental catastrophist and friend of mill owners, opposed aid for the Victorian poor.

“Too many environmental scientists buy into the idea that living in the new era requires a technocracy”

I think that the myth of past ignorance serves today’s top dogs well, too. Arguably, we saw that during December’s Paris talks on climate change, at which US negotiators worked tirelessly to ensure no language was entered into the Paris agreement that might hold them responsible for past CO2 emissions – and thus vulnerable to demands for reparations. Year Zero on climate change is 1990, with the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The authors ask who wins and who loses as a result of the strategies being proposed to fix climate change, a key problem for the Anthropocene. Following the Paris conference, will forests be grabbed from their traditional owners in the name of protecting “carbon sinks”? That would be a savage blow to people not responsible for climate change. And it would be a convenient alternative to curbing the emissions of rich polluters.

The spectre of a depoliticised global environmental governance to save the planet may anger Amazon tribes as much as climate sceptics. Charting a course for Spaceship Earth is not a task for just a few navigators; we all need to decide where we are headed, and how we get there.

For me, the authors are too ready to see the Anthropocene as an intellectual conspiracy, cooked up to reframe global domination by fat cats as a green project. In the process, they mangle the work and motivations of researchers such as Jim Lovelock, who devised the Gaia theory that helped create the notion of the Anthropocene. He is dismissed as a child of the “scientific-military-industrial complex of the cold war”.

In places, too, the book fuels a dangerous split between natural sciences and the humanities. By portraying some scientists as little better than “green fascists”, the authors can at times seem like frothing climate sceptics.

But in questioning the idea of an apolitical Anthropocene and raising the spectre of a new self-selecting scientific geocracy, their book should begin a vital discussion. We do need a new politics of the Anthropocene.